Face to Face Marketing and Door to Door Marketing

Nothing beats the reality that one gets when you can interact with potential clients face to face physically moving from door to door within a community or household to household, face to face field marketing is also called personal selling or door to door marketing, customers are met directly in order to sell their products, using this method of field marketing we rely on our skills and persuasive abilities. During the period where we get to interact with the client face to face we get more chance to pass across edible information which would be useful to all our customers at that time and it’s also an opportunity for us to get feedback and to gauge your opinion about our business.

I did door-to-door sales for nine years, in hundreds of different cities and towns all across the india. Through long, hard, agonizing trial and error, I eventually developed enough skill that I could take any product into any area on any day and make sales.

In the beginning, I struggled. But when I was about to give up on myself and quit (like 99.9% of people that try door-to-door sales do within their first few days), experienced salesperson to give me a chance to get on track.

What I saw that day changed my life forever.

I watched as the experienced salesperson drove to an area where he had previous sales success, and listened as he explained to me why he parked his car in the exact spot he did to start his day and laid out his exact plan of attack.
Within the first 10 minutes, I learned a valuable lesson that not only made my door-to-door sales career much easier, but has also been the key to bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for my own companies, and those of thousands of others I’ve consulted to:

A current customer is the easiest person to make a sale to – many, many times easier (and less expensive) than trying to get new customers.

Most business owners operate a risky, day-to-day, transactional business, believing that the reason for getting a customer is to make a sale. That’s their biggest problem: making nothing more than “a” sale to a customer. After that initial transaction, they simply hope that their product or service or location is good enough that they will get a repeat visit from that customer.

On the other hand, sharp business owners (and door-to-door salespeople!) know that the point to making a sale is to get a customer. We have systems put together to maximize the value of that customer by making future offers to them, so that they buy more of the same product or service, or a different version, or even an entirely different product or service.

In other words, we recognize that a current customer is the easiest person to sell to, and a prospect is the hardest and most-expensive person to sell to. Therefore, we concentrate on maximizing the value of every new customer we get.

If you want to grow your business during these challenging economic times (and even during boom times), your time and effort should be invested in working to turn prospects into customers and retain them to market to in the future.
While your marketing is doing its job to get you prospects, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:

Inviting
Informative
Enjoyable

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded “buyer’s remorse.” You want to minimize this as best you can, and if you’ve provided a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, the risk will be lower.

However, returns can still occur. Here are the two most effective ways to deal with this:

Offer to refund money — no questions asked
Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product

These offers alone will also lessen the impact of buyer’s remorse, because the customer will trust you more just because you showed the confidence in your product or service to offer these options in the first place.

There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:

Offer a special price as an opportunity for them to test the market.
Offer a lower price with a legitimate reason, such as clearing out inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s braces, or another tangible reason. (Added bonus: Customers love you for doing this, because it makes you so much more human to them.)
Offer a referral incentive.
Offer a smaller, less expensive entry-level product to build trust.
Offer package deals.
Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
Offer extra incentives, such as longer warranties or free bonuses, if they order by a certain date.
Offer financing options, if applicable.
Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
Offer special packaging or delivery.
Offer “name-your-own-price” incentives.
Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
Offer to let them trade up or upgrade to something better if they want.
Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.

The options are really only limited by your imagination and marketing skill. You can use these or other ideas to discover what works the best for your specific business, with your specific products, services and target market.

Even if you ever find yourself doing door-to-door sales.

Marketing Companies in Katraj

The Art of Strategic Marketing: Market Learning, Sensing, and Intuiting

Market Learning

The first step in strategic marketing is to learn from the market about the changing consumer preferences and attitudes. Firms typically employ market research agencies to conduct surveys and research reports about how consumers and their preferences goods and services over others are changing with the times. In other words, firms attempt to understand the market by direct observation by surveying the consumers and finding out what they would buy. Apart from this, market learning also involves direct interaction with the consumers to try and understand why they prefer a certain brand to others. The strategies that the firm adopts after the market learning process are based on the feedback that they have received from the ground. This kind of strategizing is quite popular with marketers and practitioners of strategic marketing as it helps them fine tune their strategies based on market preferences.

Market Sensing

This approach deals with going a step ahead of market learning and combining data and experience to understand how the market moves. In other words, after the data collection is done, marketers who are experienced or talented put the data and the strategic models of marketing together and try and sense how the market moves. For those who follow the stock markets, the term mood of the market and market sentiment is terms that can be known as sensing how the market moves based on both data and the wisdom of accumulated experience.

Market Intuiting

We have discussed how firms try and understand consumer preferences by direct observation and by an indirect analytical method of sensing how the market would move. The third aspect in this sub-topic of strategic marketing takes the whole concept ever further by adopting what can be called as Market Intuiting. In other words, this approach involves to know the mind and soul of the market and to predict the future based on both data and an intuitive understanding of how the market would move. Lest one thinks that this approach is like Astrology or other such forms of prediction, there have been the cases of marketers like the late legendary Steve Jobs who could feel it in his gut about how consumers would either flock to the brands or abandon it altogether. The idea in this approach is to preempt the future by preparing for it and as the saying goes, chance favors the prepared mind. Hence, after studying the market through direct observation, sensing the mood of the market, this third approach is to get into the very essence of the consumer, which is to do with how he or she would behave in the future.

Closing Thoughts

The key aspect here is that in the fast changing business landscape of the 21st century, it is not merely enough to measure data and proceed accordingly. On the other hand, the consumer behavior, which is in a flux, cannot be sensed by experience alone. Hence, the combination of the strategies outlined here can be followed to beat the expectations of the consumers and by gaining insights into the mind of the consumer and getting inside their heads, marketers can hope to outclass the competition.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Articales from http://www.managementstudyguide.com

Creating Integrated Marketing Communication Plan

Integrated marketing communication integrates all aspects of marketing mix to promote products and services among the end-users at the right time and right place. You need to promote your products well for maximum awareness among the end-users. According to integrated marketing communication plan, various methods of promoting a brand are put together for maximum effectiveness and better results.

Let us understand the same with the help of an example:

Organization B deals in providing lucrative holiday packages to end-users. The first step would be to identify the target customers. It is crucial for the organizations to understand who would be the best buyers for their products and services (in this example). For honeymoon packages they need to target the newlyweds, for pilgrimage packages, it would be the senior citizens and so on. Organization B can promote its brand by simultaneously giving advertisement in the news paper (print media), promoting through social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Orkut), through company’s websites, banners, hoardings, press conferences and so on.

Integrated marketing communication increases the visibility of the brand and also enables customers to remember the brand whenever they go out for shopping. The impact of integrated marketing communication plan is obviously more as end-users see the brand simultaneously at multiple places.

How to create an integrated Marketing Communication Plan

An integrated marketing communication plan needs to keep in mind the available resources and time to promote a particular product or service. Budgeting and allocating right resources for promoting products and services through integrated marketing communication plan are of utmost importance. The objective of the marketing plan needs to be clear.

The second step is to gather as much information as you can about your company, brand, features and most importantly target audience. Understand who all would be the best buyers of your products and services and what they expect of you and your organization? A marketer needs to very clear of the vision, goals and objectives of his/her organization. Know what your product is offering and how would it benefit the customers?

Plan out how you would like to proceed with the integrated marketing communication plan. Always adopt a step by step approach. Do not forget to do your homework carefully before writing an integrated marketing communication plan. Thorough research is essential.

Integrated marketing communication plan needs to include:

Detailed summary of your marketing plan as to how it intends to promote products and services among target customers.
Background, history and vision of your organization.
Know your products well. Include features and essential components of your brand.
Target market needs to be described well. Plan out how your brand can meet and exceed customer expectations. Have clarity as to how your brand is better than your competitors and why should consumers only buy your product and not go anywhere else. It is essential to read customer’s mind and know their perceptions.
Compare your brand with the competitors. Write down how your brand is better than competitors? You need to keep a close watch on competitor’s activities.
Do a SWOT analysis which highlights the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities of the marketing plan.
Specify the tools and methods which would help you create awareness of your brand.

Integrated marketing plan needs to be reviewed periodically. Measure the results of the plan and find out how is it helping your organization promote products successfully and earn higher profits and revenues?

Steve Jobs and Sales Success

If you are a professional sales manager or if you are a professional sales person, make sure you follow this link to an article written by Guy Kawasaki about Steve Jobs. Guy indentified 12 lessons he learned from Steve while working at Apple. I don’t know what your perception was of Steve, nor does it matter relative to this post or to Guy’s blog. What is important is that, if you look at these 12 lessons, many, if not all of them, will apply to improving your opportunity for success in sales or sales management.

Of the 12, here are my big three;

1. Customers cannot tell you what they want. Intellectually, you can say “duh”, but from a practical perspective what this means is that we have to be masterful at asking guiding questions to help prospective customers discover what they want and/or NEED.

2. Big challenges beget the best work. Interesting that over the last 2 years, as many organizations struggle to meet budget, goal and forecast, the suggestion here is to raise the bar.

3. Marketing boils down to providing unique value. This is done by having something, demonstrating something and doing something that is unique. Telling people that you are unique when you call them on the phone, meet with them face to face or provide them written material, isn’t enough. Additionally, you need to be marketing where there is a market. If you have the newest and greatest mousetrap, you have to have someone that wants to buy it because they have mice to kill that cannot be killed any other way.

Tags: extraordinary people, keys to sales success, sales people, inspirational